The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

There's been a lot of talk of roles like growth hackers, marketing ninjas, and technical marketing in the past year. Regardless of whether or not you subscribe to these labels, technical skills are becoming a requirement for success in online marketing. The marketers who know SQL, can write code, leverage APIs, and perform quantitative analysis will be the most desirable and productive individuals in our industry. Those without these skills will find it increasingly difficult to find ideal career opportunities.

I've prepared this guide as an overview to the technical skills that are most helpful in online marketing and included a directory of resources to help you get there.

Instead of focusing on what those who do technical marketing call themselves, I'd rather we explore what it means to be technical and help each other develop those skills. Refer to these marketers however you like; what really matters is what we're capable of as professionals.

Can a marketer be technical? Of course. (And developers can be phenomenal marketers, too.)

I started my own career as a developer and slowly became more focused on marketing as the years progressed. I worked as a developer when Netscape Navigator was popular and Yahoo was #1 in search. However, I was a pretty lousy developer, slapping things together with table tags and transparent gifs. I was fortunate enough to keep my job because that's how most of us did web development back then.

I'm actually more technical now as a full-time marketer than I ever was back then because I've been fortunate to continually be exposed to, work with, and do work that requires technical skills. And that's really only because it was a matter of necessity in the organizations I've worked in. So, if an unfocused individual like me can do this, anyone can.

Better examples can be found in the phenomenal marketing and technical skills of individuals like Richard Baxter, Vanessa Fox, Wil Reynolds, Alex Schultz, Tom Critchlow, or Michelle Robbins. All of these individuals have different stories of how they developed their capabilities, but I'd bet they all share a passion for staying up late, tinkering, and hacking away at their work, with a strong desire to always be developing new skills. (As a side note, I feel so fortunate to work an industry with so many individuals like this, and it's been an absolute pleasure to learn from them.)

Developers can be remarkable marketers, too, and some of the best marketers I've known work as developers first and foremost. The one difference is that a lack of marketing skills is not likely to prevent an engineer from being successful at their work. Marketers, on the other hand, are going to have a much more difficult time doing their work without some semblance of technical skills, which brings me to my next thought:

Generalist/specialists are the new minimum viable professional

For generations, professionals have been pressured to be either a generalist or specialist. The generalists were the managers who oversaw operations, and had a holistic view of how marketing was accomplished, but were less capable of doing the work themselves. Generalists relied upon specialists who knew how to write, design, code, or analyze. And for generations of marketing, this worked just fine.

But, this trend just doesn't cut it anymore. To be successful nowadays, you need have both a breadth and depth of skills. You have to know what to ask for and how it's done. Without both of these capabilities, you're prone to be less efficient than a colleague or competitor who does.

This is especially pronounced in the startup world, where budgets are constrained and companies can't afford to hire both managers and specialists. And this trend explains why the growth hacker meme is so popular in startup communities. You have to be able to do everything to hack it at a startup.

I like refer to these individuals as generalist specialists. These are individuals who have both knowledge of marketing channels, methods, and techniques, but also have the specialist technical knowledge to understand what's possible and what's not, and to do the work themselves.

Know what to ask for, or just do the work yourself

Perhaps my favorite reason to develop these skills is the ability to communicate better with everyone in your organization. If you know what's possible, then you'll know what to ask for when you work with developers, designers, and analysts. And in many cases, you'll be able to just do the work yourself.

What is a technical marketer capable of?

Stated simply, a great technical marketer can devise, develop, launch, and analyze their marketing campaigns with little or no assistance. The example I've prepared below is fictitious, but by no means a panacea. I happen to be using a fictitious marketer at Incase, a company I randomly chose, but whose products I really like.

So, let's take a look at the process and capabilities a technical marketer would use to manage their efforts.

1. Find something to improve

A technical marketer can review their efforts and find and prioritize opportunities for improvement. In this case, our marketer has decided to try to increase repeat purchases.

2. Devise a strategy

From there, they need to determine how they are going to accomplish that.

3. Forecast the improvement

The next step is to estimate the efficacy of the campaign to see if it's worth their time and effort. It looks like it is!

4. Pull customer list from database

The marketer would then use SQL to query their database for the appropriate users to generate an email list.

5. Wireframe the email, and write the copy

From there, they would create a simple wireframe and draft the email copy.

6. Design and code the HTML for the email template

Next up is creating the HTML template, first using an image editor like Photoshop, and then developing the HTML and CSS.

7. Instrument end-to-end tracking

The marketer will then ensure that there is end-to-end tracking in place, and likely place a few test orders to confirm it's all working properly.

8. Launch the campaign

It's time to send the campaign and wait for the results. Meanwhile, our fictitious marketer enjoys a bland, but reasonably-priced American beer.

9. Evaluate the results

A few days later, the marketer collects analytics from the various systems, combines them in Excel, and calculates the quantitative impact of the campaign.

10. Automate for ongoing success

The marketer determines the campaign was successful enough to do it each month and develops a script will automate the process.

11. Correlate those that receive email with purchases

Ever the ambitious individual, the marketer then performs some statistical analysis to determine if those who receive email campaigns have a higher propensity to make purchases on the site.

12. Rinse and repeat

After a successful campaign, the marketer begins all over again, armed with additional experience on what sort of campaigns are successful, and is better prepared to be successful in the future.

What does it take to get there? Here's a recipe to develop your technical skills.

The capabilities demonstrated above show a fictional marketer who is able to run a successful campaign with little or no assistance from others. So, how do you get there? Primarily, by jumping in, trying it out, and learning as you go.

To help you on your way, I've put together a recipe of skills with links to resources. Some resources are better than others, and you can pursue them in any order you'd like. Have better resources than what I've included? Please feel free to contribute them in the comments.

Databases and SQL

Pull your own data. Understand how databases work and create your own.​

Many paths, one result: an unstoppable force of capability, limited only by your own creativity.

Developing technical skills isn't about being becoming indispensable; it's about developing capabilities to be self-reliant when necessary and providing signficiant value to your organization. These skills help you not only in doing your own work, but in working with your team and other individuals. In other words, these skills will remain valuable for your entire career.

I'd love to know what you think in the comments. What resources do you like? What have you used to bolster your technical skills?

About Jamie —
Jamie is the Founder and CEO of Codename Zen and previously the Chief Marketing Officer at Moz. He likes pumpkin-flavored beverages including lattes and beer—both excellent choices for chilly Seattle weather. You can follow him on Twitter @jamies.

Comments
110

Awesome, Jamie. I need to set aside some time to read this closely and look at all the resources. I've long believed that SEOs are, in fact, technical marketers. At least that is how I described myself to marketing generalists in the early 2000s. Search marketers work on that line between the marketing and development departments in house. Some organizations still struggle with where to place SEO in the internal organization structure.

Some organizations still struggle with where to place SEO in the internal organization structure.Totally true Lindsay: they literally don't know where to put "that damned SEO guy": IT, PR or Marketing?

Not that I don't agree with you, but because of the things I still have to really learn in order to fit into this description, especially because I come from the editorial/content field and not from a tech/engineering one and I've a natural idiosyncracy for coding.

Being conscious of this, that's why I usually tend to say that I'm not that "star" sometimes people define me and tend to absorb like a sponge every bit of information like yours.

But isn't having conscience of your weaknesses the first step for solving them?

By the way, you have practically designed a sort of "Master in technical online marketing"; if I was you I would start tracking the courses inspired by your post :).

Ah... what you describe is a figure that have ton of sense in the consultancy/agency/startup environments, but in the in-house one, where exists granitic departments and bureaucracies, I would add another skill to learn/improve: diplomacy.

"There's more to marketing than meets the eye" spring to mind. And I don't think anyone can truly say they cannot learn any more.I know for us, deciding not to be experts in many CMS' for example was hard, because actually it's about the tools you use and how well you use them to achieve what you're looking for.I came from a development background (and still do a lot of developing) but when we create a new website for a client, I can apply all the tech knowledge along with SEO/Marketing principles and it means the website has a great grounding for future success. It's great having technical knowledge - but I also would say 'work in team' where possible so you don't get depressed realising what you *don't* yet know and harness knowledge where others have it to achieve a common goal :)

Thanks Gianluca. It's a tremendous amount to ask one to attempt to master all of these skills-- I've yet to know anyone who's accomplished that.

I'd say it's more important to know the full breadth of what COULD be useful, and have resources to learn a bit more, when needed. It might be that you only need to learn basic SQL, and have a cursory knowledge of email deliverability, for example. But, you're absolutely correct, better to have known unknowns, than unknown unknowns!

Nice post. This goes hand-in-hand with Rand's recent Whiteboard Friday "What's Really Included in An SEO's Job." I personally come from a very technical background and have been building myself up in the SEO arena.

It seems that programming and SEO are overlapping more and more. I
think it's important for both types of professionals to keep expanding
their knowledge. But it's also good for each person to know his/her own
limitations and interests. For example, I am knowledgeable in anything
programming plus "classic SEO" on-page/on-site optimization. I am
not as experienced with keyword targeting, content marketing / link
building, social media, etc. so I would work with an SEO for these
pieces.

In short, if you aren't knowledgeable (or interested)
enough in an area, it's much better to work with the right resource rather than
to do everything yourself. SEOs and web developers need to collaborate
so they can divide and conquer tasks to meet the company's SEO goals.

You're absolutely correct. I may have focused on the importance of being able to do many of these activities yourself, but it's just as important to be capable of working with and relying upon others. Having some limited technical knowledge is those areas will make the process of working with a developer that much more productive.

What would be really cool is if SEOs learned the more "techie" side of marketing and the techies learned the marketing side of marketing. That way they could come together about their weaknesses in the fields they're learning and improve their clients' business and the marketing field as a whole.

Thank you for the well-timed "manual" as start-ups are having a hard time succeeding. Your tips could save them a lot of time and effort for achieving their goals.

Great post. I want to point out a few items that sometimes get lost in our world of black or white.

1) Jamie is pointing out several areas that a marketer can expand his/her skill set. It is not required to master all of these skills but if you want to continue to evolve and learn, target some of these more "technica"l skills to help move your projects forward.

2) One thing not mentioned is the collaboration and confidence you can build with your already existing technical teams. I have personally noticed how respect amongst teams can grow if the "marketing guy" is willing to learn programming, wireframming or other technical skills that the technical teams have traditionally owned. It will show the team you are willing to learn the craft.

3) If you have endless resources - then great don't worry about learning technical skills. But most SMBs need to leverage their employees as much as possible. If the marketing person can plan, build and report on a the marketing campaign 100% themselves, it will greatly improve the efficiencies of the department.

I was exploring a similar line of thinking in my post last week on Distilled - "Building a T-Shaped Web Marketing Skill Set" - but you've gone into a lot more depth and provided a great list of resources to get people started.

Seems to me that SEOs (at least the ones who know what they're doing) are just technical marketers with deep expertise in search. In this context, the "SEO" label may as well be as useless as "growth hacker" - especially as the SEO skill set expands to encompass many things outside the traditional realm of SEO responsibility.

Wow, that's great post, Mike. And I agree with you, labels, including SEO can be so board. I prefer to focus on just saying "here's what I do." That may include SEO, HTML, reporting, design, whatever...

Hmmm I would disagree ... Some of the best marketers i have known would know the concepts in and out but they were not able to do it themselves. Even if you look around .. the likes of brad callen and many more people who have been very successful had good logic but not sure if they could themselves do it all. I think it would be nice if a marketer is technical but its not 100% required.

One important fact which you missed is that if you get into the minute things sometimes you miss the bigger picture that is why is it also important for a marketer to look at things from a broader point of view and if he gets involved in doing it all he can so easily miss the bigger picture.

You're absolutely correct about not getting hyper-focused on the minutia; perhaps a topic for another blog post. :-)

I will say I don't know if I would consider someone knowing the concepts unless they have some capability to do the work, but in most cases I think all you need is cursory understanding of this topics. Most of the time that's all you need to work well with a developer, design or copywriter. In (early stage) startup world, however, all bets are off-- I think marketers do need the concepts as well as how to do the work.

Haha yeh and now you steal my idea for your next blog post ;-)Yeh chrystal clear concepts are a must, if you can code it its a icing on the cake but still not getting into the micro stuff is what people miss.

Analysis in itself is a big task, and drawing the right inference from all the data is even bigger task. Imagine doing every thing and having enough free time and grey cells in mind to draw the correct inferences... But yes knowing the concepts of tech stuff is imp or else you wont know it can be done in a given way, but whether or not you should do it all by yourself even if you know is a different question. Again if you are a start up you dont really have any options so if you are starting a startup or hiring a marketing guy for a start up i would totally agree with you but if you have the $$ best to use experts for each field.

My word Jamie, this is exactly the kind of brief post that I require. I am some1 who has immense difficulty when it comes to the development aspect and coding part and have a tough time when developers put across their suggestions or tell me that something can't be done due to so and so...issues.

It is then that u realize about how important it is to know the technical aspect of website development. This article is really a god send for people like me! Thanks for this once again, Jamie.

The example wasn't the best choice because most of that is automated already by large email delivery platforms like Mail Chimp, AWeber, etc. that have the database and all the analytics tracking set up. I really hope no companies are intentionally querying an SQL database and hand coding HTML emails unless they really want to. To a newbie this would seem terrifying if they didn't know how easy it actually is to send emails as you've demonstrated!

But I agree that having a technical set of skill and a marketing mind is a killer combo. Don't believe one bit that it's required by everyone, but probably most everyone should have the basics down. The list of links at the base is primo as well.

Thanks! Yeah, my example is truly the full breadth of doing everything manually. We use the email template editor in our email marketing platform, too. Though I'm glad to know that person who does that can also edit the raw HTML, which is occasionally necessary when the WYSIWYG does a poor job. Regarding SQL; we may be crazy, bu the Moz marketing team is often accessing our database using SQL, particularly to ensure lists are in sync amongst a few of our platforms.

I think a marketer does have to be a technical marketer if he is a one man show. But nothing beats a good team made up of a marketer and a technical person. One plans, the other executes. I think that if the marketer gets to technical, he may loose focus, not concentrate on the big picture while he is focusing on the inner technical details. Of course, this is in a perfect world. In real life where most of us are one-man shows, we do have to handle both sides of the equation.

Darn straight! The marketing team at Moz has dedicated web developer resources-- and it's been a huge boon to productivity. Those devs luckily also know marketing, so they're a great fit for doing marketing development.

I think you're overstating the depth of the technical expertise needed.

Extract lists of previous customers from a database, create targeted emails, measure purchases. Lots of systems (Infusionsoft, Office Autopilot etc) let you do this pretty simply. You don't need to know sql, html or e-commerce systems to do it.

Which brings up the points that:

a) Companies who use half decent systems won't have such a tough time hiring people to do their marketing...b) As technology develops, the depth of technical skills needed to be a technical marketer will surely decrease. Just as these days a graphic designer or a typesetter can do their work with drag and drop tools rather than having to work in "raw code" the same must surely be true of what you're calling technical marketing.

While those systems do provide many of these capabilities, I personally feel that still knowing how the sausage is made is important. Though, I wasn't entirely clear that I don't think you need to master all of these areas, but having some knowledge is quite helpful.

For example, we use InfusionSoft ourselves, but because it's not our database of record our email marketing person still needs to pull lists using SQL to import into that system. Systems provide these functionalities if you use everything as intended, but I've found that most companies have edge cases that require marketers to roll up their sleeves every once and awhile.

What a fantastic post. This has given me some great ideas. Some of which I have been thinking about for a long time just never got around too!Now I'm going to put them higher on the list and automate email processes a lot more.

Awesome post, Jamie. Going to go ahead and say this is one of the best posts I've read in a while and will be referencing this for some time to come (I'm one of the less tech savvy marketers but understand the power a technical marketer can bring to the table). Thanks for sharing.

One of the most important posts I've read as a newcomer to internet marketing. When I saw the articles heading I immediately disagreed, thinking to what makes our team so good, having each person with their area of expertise and everyone's skills complementing others. But once I read it, it did all make sense, when an individual has the ability to have both marketing and developer knowledge it makes the process seamless.Also the links for learning all the skills are great!

I think this is a great article with lots of food for thought - I'm not sure I agree that they have to be able to do it all themselves, but rather that they need to have a good understanding and appreciation of what can be done and how the technology works. I think it's great if they have the aptitude to learn it.

I also think that the marketing ideas from the 'technical' people are far too often overlooked and that the best ideas come from collaborating among people with different skills and experience - as long as the customer is the focal point.

When I was managing a web presence from in my corporate life I always found it worked best to have the marketing and technical teams sit and work together side by side.

This is an awfully valuable post. It's like the preliminary lexicon for technical marketing. I'm more so on the brand development side of things, but have quickly realized the importance of being able to market my brand strategy for clients.

Question:

Since a strong brand is the foundation to any effective marketing campaign, what are the hard skills for that field (i.e., market research, etc)?

You know, that's a great question Chris. Honestly, I think it's creativity. So long as the your understand the fundamentals of brand marketing, creativity is what will separate a mediocre campaign vs. a wildly successful one. Keep in mind, I "borrow" creativity from others by drawing inspiration for others, and mixing that into my own ideas and work.

Thanks for the reply! So may two tangible solutions for being an effective brand specialist be to adopt Alex Osborne's Creative Solving Process and learn how to do market research (or perhaps that's what 'forecasting' is)?

Your list of 12 skills are realistic benchmarks for being a strong technical marketer. If there were any similar benchmarks for branding, I'd feel like not only would I be able to "devise, develop, launch, and analyze marketing campaigns without or no assistance", for CTA but I'd be able to effectively "deliver the promise" for customer loyalty, repeat business.

I think this a great discussion (and post), but I admit that I'm always hesitant to jump into the debate. Simply put, I know I'm terribly biased. I've been coding since I was 9 years old, and technical skills have always been the base of my work. I've also worked almost exclusively for start-ups, where being a generalist probably has more impact than in large (and sometimes rigid) corporate structures.

I'll say this, though - technical skills have catapulted my career forward the past few years. A lot of my recent projects (including MozCast) would've sat forever if I had to get them into the development priority queue. That's not an insult to our dev team, just a fact of life - they have a product to focus on. Being able to code means I can create my own proof-of-concept projects and then use those to sell my ideas. I can't begin to express how much more effective it is to go to the C-team with "I built this - what do you think?" than "I've got this idea!"

I find it in more subtle ways, too, though. I've been involved in a lot of feasibility projects lately - testing ideas that might be useful to Engineering or the Product Team. If I have to wait for data, code, etc., these projects can take weeks or even end up being moot. If I can collect my own data, run a few queries, etc., I can do in days what might take a team weeks, simply because everyone's juggling ten things.

Does every marketer need to understand databases, know how to code, etc.? No - I can't go that far. Has that basic skill set helped me as a marketer? Yes, immeasurably.

After reading your comment, I've had to consider if I too have the same bias. I suppose I do! That's certainly a reason why I see the value; but I see more of it in working with the team at Moz who possess many of these skills... As a result, I have such confidence in our ability to do extraordinary work.

I am regularly surprised by what people come up with because they were able to query the database themselves, create their own email template, or create an RFM model to analyze our customer base.

Jamie Yes you are absolutely right if marketer is not technical and they do not have any knowledge about SEO then how to analyse any campaigns before starting.so I think every marketer should have knowledge of Technical and as well as SEO.

Great post Jamie! I'm a 'generalist online marketer' myself and although I've toyed with the idea of learning to code, I'm made a conscious decision not to. Instead, I'm investing this time in content and link building experiments with a couple of niche sites, maintaining relationships with bloggers in my field, etc. There's a balance to how many areas you can master without ending up "jack of all trades, master of none"That said, this post inspired me to learn to set up and optimize our Sendgrid based emails without any help from devs.

If someone where to actually go to all the links that you provided, grasp the concepts, and learn everything that was there, it would take a very long time. For someone to master all of these skills, they would be a 'super' employee for some company.

For those of us who work with 'mom and pop shops', helping them to be successful on the internet, most of what you mention doesn't apply. You want to give them good site, that gets found in local search results.

I came from a technical background, I know HTML, CSS, SQL, PHP, and a ton of other stuff, but all that doesn't really matter as far as getting results for my clients. That is part of the development of sites, but from a marketing standpoint, it's trivial.

And.. my plan is to have an agency.... with a team.. because one person can't be the expert at everything. It's just too much.

Thank you very much Jamie. Your article was full of link and resources. If you want some more about statistic, I found a very interesting course ad udacity.com (free university) about statistic: http://www.udacity.com/overview/Course/st101

I can tell you this, this post is definitely on to something. I started an ecommerce company 6 years ago and I knew nothing about marketing. I was a developer, more like a hack! But with that knowledge I was able to leverage tools and gain more marketing insight over time. Today my ecommerce sites are highly successful, and I think that this article provides some insight as to the reason. Today's internet marketing has made accessible so much data, that it can now begin to look more and more like a science. I think that this has opened the marketing world up to developers, allowing them to contribute and prosper in new ways. Great post!

A nice post and an interesting
topic. I really liked the way you presented the concept. I especially liked
section three talking about forecast and improvement. From my experience, it is
often missed.

I work at a company called
Optimove. We work with marketing executives in industries like gaming, forex,
ecommerce, and this topic comes up a lot. Obviously it would be ideal
if a marketing person had all the skills mentioned in the article, but if he
does it all himself, his time will be occupied by the technical side and he
will lose focus on what he should really be doing – marketing. Do you
know the saying Grasp all, lose all? It could happen. It would be
preferred if a marketer had a basic understanding of numbers and statistics,
but it's not a must.

There are many tools out there
that a marketer can use to do the things mentioned in the article without
knowing the technicality behind it. For example, many of the Email Service
Providers (that every company needs regardless of the technical capabilities of
its marketers) have a simple integrated tool that enables you to create your
own HTML email templates without the need of any web development knowledge.
Optimove is another example. It is a unique web based software,
integrating a customer modeling technology with end-to-end campaign management
capabilities. This software saves the marketer from having to learn SQL and
database, excel, analytics, forecasting and statistics because it is all done
automatically. Our software enable the marketer to easily create target
groups based on smart customer segmentations. Then, execute (the software
is integrated to some of the largest ESPs) and evaluate the short term results
of marketing campaigns by using test and control groups. After the campaign
data has been collected, we can recommend the best action for every customer. Just
search ‘Optimove’ to find out more about us.

Thanks for this post Jamie. For those of us looking to get started, do you have any recommendations on which skill to start with, and what order to follow? I know some of the skills you've mentioned will be useful foundational pieces when trying to learn others. I just want to make sure I'm tackling things in the most logical order. Thanks again, Keith

No.No.No.No.No. Knowing a bit of SQL doesn't make you a better marketing person and you have to understand Google Analytics did not invent quantitative analysis for ad marketing. (Nielsen was doing media analytics in the 1930s!)If you marketing something, you should spend your time - marketing. If you are spending all your time coding marketing into your product or trying to learn some whizz bang marketing platform tool, you are not out there talking and listening to the people who will spend money on your company's product or service. You're not a marketeer. You being an engineer or data analyst. The only caveats to this rule are. Know something about what your product does and how it is made. Now, if you are marketing lipstick, you don't need to now about HTML, but know how they make lipstick. If you market databases, at least know what one is.The other is. If you are a software start-up at least have one person who will also help out with marketing, that is until you have the funding / cash to actually find someone who is a marketing person.From a career point of view. Don't spend all your time learning Javascript. Read something like Kotler or HBR instead.

p.s. I've a PhD, started as an engineer and now work in 100% marketing in a technology company.

I agree. One should focus one a specific area in order to be more specialized at their job. But in case of a SEO, I would argue that I would rather hire one that knows what to optimize and how to optimize at the same time.

Jamie I do agree with you and your post is great about “Every Marketer Should Be Technical” because if you are placing all the things without make sure the technical areas of your marketing it will not be a perfect one and there will be less chances that you can get the best results although a non technical marketer also get a response but so many time he get less than a technical marketer. Thanks for this awesome post and perfect writing.

I had to draw upon my technical skills just to leave this comment! Apparently when in Chrome, you are given a greeting of "You are already logged in." rather than a comment edit box. Firefox appears to be more friendly.

I would have to agree that having technical knowledge and understanding of technical things is a powerful asset. I am not as big of a supporter of having to do your own coding, but if you have the time (rather than outsource) it would be fun.

Being able to leap from big picture to behind the scenes is what I have found my technical background has given me over the years. Nothing replaces time and experience for the big picture stuff, although I have met some younger lads and lasses with some amazing wisdom and intuition.

Aside from testing ideas, technical knowledge is great on the front lines as well, even in a sales environment. The right combination of sales skill and ability to listen to the true needs of a client or partner and then address those needs in an understandable way to that individual while soundly pinning the presented solution to a do-able technical model in your mind saves hours and hours of meetings.

Was anyone else in the middle of checking 3 emails, updating a blog, listening to music, getting their daughter ready for a Christmas concert and planning out the next push for an inbound campaign?

Thank you for sharing this post and all its accompanying resources. It's a link I will be sharing with my team tomorrow!

I lead a team of business analysts whose job it is to elicit requirements from clients on a strategic, tactical and also logistical level; that is and respectively - what business goals are driving the digital initiative, how do the clients see their vision being executed and then the analysts work with our technical team to document (at the functional level) how this is going to happen.

They sit in the middle of a diverse set of people with needs - clients, developers, designers, testers, SEO, Analytics, etc. They need to know it well enough to explain it, write it down and well enough to never lose the client's vision.

It's my opinion that they need to know something about "everything.The guidance you give here underscores this point for me.

From a former career - I equate it to being a '"GC" for a new home building project. You need to know something about everything so you know what to ask about, what to refer to the experts (master electricians, plumbers, framers, etc) and most importantly, how it all comes together.

One thing I'd add to the list of skills is CRO. Every modern marketer should be able to do A/B/n split tests and multivariate testing.

I'd say that the list you gave could be somewhat overwhelming; particularly for anyone who for whatever reason isn't working XX hour days.

I think it's best to take one area at a time and really get to know it. Get to understand the fundamentals, and apply them. With some areas, like AdWords and SEO, I'd guestimate that in a few weeks or months most people can start applying the basic lessons.

With others, I think it will take far more time. Going from no experience (and without a crazy natural talent) to being able to do good web design or creating a custom booking system is very hard.

Indeed, I've learnt from experience that a tendency to want to do everything can be harmful. So for example, trying to learn how to make a decent infographic in GIMP when you've got no experience is often not cost-effective. You'll take too much time (with the associated opportunity cost) and the end product simply will not be as good as somebody who has been thinking about and practising graphic design for years.

It's for this reason developers and designers earn the good livings that they do. Most of us can't just gain their skills without investing a lot of time. Not all areas associated with marketing have the same learning curve, and the very steep areas (like, for most people, development) should be approached with caution.

So I think its important to:

- Understand the fundamentals of everything connected to your work in marketing. - Set realistic goals on what you're learning.- Stick to learning one or two things at a time.- Be in it for the long run. It's very easy to see superstar super-motivated 18 hour-a-day marketers and think 'crap, I'm useless'. Gradually building up your skills is good so long as you're focused and you're learning things that are likely to yield decent returns on the time you're putting in.

Finally, there is always a cost associated with generalism. If there is any individual alive who is as good as Brad Geddes at AdWords, and Brian Clifton in Google Analytics, and Steve Krug in UX testing and so on, I will be astonished. I also want to read their work :p

Great article! I already considering myself a "Digital Marketing Engineer" and do the majority of this already. I was looked at funny when I had to explain myself for enjoying both technology and marketing.

It's really a great article, it will be a trend to be the fictional marketer in real life. I think you won't mind I share this article to my local community, I spent almost 3 hours translate it into my local language.

In a small, fast growing company, developing these skills comes as a natural form of survival. When everybody has to wear lots of hats, you become very diversified in your skill set. The happy moments are when you can take a step back, recognize the toolbox you've started, then start to hone the skills that make the magic handshake between the technical side and the marketing side. Thank you for this article, it will help me on my journey to refine the magic handshake.

Great post Jamie and I have to agree that most marketers have to be well rounded to get the job done, they have know how to "code" how to use "photo shop", and how to analyze data.Also I don't think that anybody said it, but thanks for sharing all the links at the bottom. As I tell our entire team, if you're not learning you're not marketing. This post will definitely be bookmarked so our team can look back at it later.

Good post. I think the term you are looking for is "Versatilist" (someone who applies depth of skill to a progressively widening scope of situations and
experiences, gaining new competencies, building relationships, and
assuming new roles). This term was coined by Thomas Friedman in his book 'The World is Flat'. Highly recommend reading it by the way.

In the startup community this stuff is true, and we all know what the success rates of startups are. When you hire someone who's capable of doing all these things, you're hiring someone who's not going to stand out as being really good at any of them. Think of the big companies out there - DPSG, Capital One, etc. - are they hiring people who have to do all of these things as part of their job? No. They have people in very specific roles (SEO team, copywriting team, graphic design team, analytics team, etc) who are very good at what they do. And that's part of why those companies stay in the positions they're in.

I think you have answered yourself calling Ogilvy and Co. "Marketers" and not "Technical Marketers".

But, if you look back to their works, they were also technical marketers in their specific field, which, obviously, wasn't previewing the importance of Internet.

Possibly an Ogilvy of the XXI century would be also a tech marketer, IMHO.

I liked your comment by the way, because in digging deeper in a possible answer, we could start talking about the competitive advantages an SEO/Web Marketing Agency may have with respect to a traditional Media Agency.

A great question. In the case of Ogilvy and Halbert, technology wasn't what it is now when they were coming up, but I'd argue they were still quite technical for their time. Ogilvy helped pioneer television attribution, in addition to being a brilliant and creative mind. And Halbert was a pioneer (if not THE pioneer) of direct response. They were technical enough to devise these methods, perhaps not in the way we think of being 'technical' today, but certainly way ahead of their time.

As a side note, Ogilvy is using flash on their site. :-( This makes me think they may still be one of the best at branding, but they've got a lot to learn about the web.

My thoughts are more about being a marketer today, than in the 20th century. But I'd still argue that those who were the most successful had the creative mind along with the understanding and capability to measure what is successful.

I would say you can't learn to be a successful marketer in the 10 minutes it took to read the post. Being successful at anything takes time, learning, developments and analysis for improvement.If this 'is too much' maybe you need to specialise?

A caution: With the controversy w3fools.com brought to light regarding some inaccuracies on w3schools.com i'd hesitate before offering these links on a resource list -- just incase there are issues on any of the pages offered.

Has anyone at SEOmoz thought of updating the CMS to remove inline styling from each link and place it in an external CSS file. Just think of the benefits to page load times, etc.

Thanks for the letting me know about that link, I've fixed it. And you're correct about w3schools.com; I've seen plenty of that discussed on Hacker News. I took your advice and added a note to one of the links.

Regarding our CMS; it's home built so in many ways flexible, but in other ways not. We're working on making some improvements in the coming months--nobody is more excited than me! :-)

Actually it looks like that inline CSS was created by Jamie presumably when copy and pasted from his original editing tool. If you look at the other links in the post, they don't have inline CSS. :) Our CMS needs a lot of upgrades, but that particular item happens to be an issue of the author. ;)

This is truly a superb post and a wakeup call for many of the lazy marketers who never bother to learn various necessary skills related to online marketing and usually run away from techinical stuff.It would be much better to print it out and paste it on your desk and try to learn all these stuff instead of claiming or pretending yourself as "organic inbound search strategist" or debating the whole day in favor of relationship building and effectiveness of content marketing or just reading 999 digital marketing blogs with a cup of coffee and sharing/twitting the whole day and writing "I love twitter" and other "twitter addiction" mentions..

Right... but I don't think Jamie is preaching a black or white position here.

What you call as "debating the whole day in favor of relationship building..." are as important for a web marketer today as all the technical knowledge Jamie listed here, because they are part of the SEO job as it has evolved.

As you cannot forget the tech side of the SEO nature, so you can't forget the Marketing (hence, relationship marketing and synergies between social and content marketing and SEO) one. They are the two sides of the same coin.

Great post. I will be sure to check the resources out. This is similar to something that I read the other day about being jack of all trades master of none. I think that in SEO and Marketing in general it is compulsory to be a jack of all trades and of course a specialist in one or two main areas.

If you aren't capable of carrying out the other tasks mentioned at a professional level it can become costly when creating marketing campaigns as things that you can get by with as a jack of all trades you become stuck with and need to involve others which takes more time and uses financial resources.Most marketing campaigns will use the biggest part of all skills in the technical spectrum and being capable of moderate skill in each goes a very long way.

Jamie, this is a really exceptional post. I think it will be most beneficial to the I-want-to-but-how? crowd. In following this example, people are going to pick up a bunch of skills they can use going forward in 1000 different areas. Really generous post - thanks a lot!

great post. Nice read. Lots of usefull resources in it too. I just doubt that it all works for everyone because you would need to be a man of all trades in that case with expertise knowledge for almost everything.

If it were me and I analyzed that the efforts would result in a profit of that size is would hire someone to this this for me while I can focus on the things I know and love without having to compensate. With profits like $9000 dollars (forecasted) you can definitly hire someone to do it for you and you can focus on the next step to make you even more money.

But the underlying meaning of this article is very clear and I comment you for making a nice long article like this.

Hi Jamie!A long write up! but more informative segments in entire post which i believe that every marketers needs to be technical sound good. I would also want to bring update you that entire resource segment within post are really incredible and out of them bit amount of resource personally i used them and they are excellent!Thanks for sharing in-depth analysis that every marketers must have technical sound!

Hey Tom !!!!! The link http://docs.joomla.org/Beginners in the post points to the link http://learn.wordpress.com/ . Kindly do the needful. Mistakes apart. Thanks for sharing all the resources. I was doing lot of Google searches to find them and finally all have assembled at once place to meet me.

I was JUST having this conversation with a member of my team yesterday! Great post. If you work in technology, you have to know how to actually do stuff. Yourself. Learn it if you don't know it. Not being able to act on your ideas directly means you're not going to be as valuable or effective.

I totally agree that marketers must have a technical knowledge to achieve a great success. Thanks you very much for sharing such a nice sources for updating knowledge about SQL, Web Server and about web developing.

I must say that in a feature we all need to behave multi tasking skills in marketing field as mobile marketing and apps usages increasing dramatically.

I love it! I don't disagree with anything you said, but perhaps I can elaborate from my point of view. I see some of these skills as more necessary than others. To seriously work in this field, we need technical SEO, analytics, and Excel skills. These are just foundational skills we should all have.

With the basics in place, it seems best to choose some skills and become highly skilled at them rather than trying to be decent at all of them. A really good SEO who is also a really good web developer (or designer, etc.) is worth much more than someone who can write ok, do some low-level statistical analysis, and implement some basic web design. I don't run a successful agency, so I'd love to hear from those who do whether they agree.

One may also be a specialist in a non-technical area, and we'd be mistaken to discount the value in some "soft" skills that aren't mentioned here. Can you relate to people? Do you know what they want and why they buy? Can you build the big vision and get people excited about a product? Inter-personal skills and big-picture abstract thinking would come in near the top of my list for skills that make a good marketer.

With all of that said... I'm feeling guilty with my weak progress on Code Academy. Thanks for the kick, Jamie :)

If everyone was a polymath then saying "every marketer should be technical" would be fair. Hell, if everyone was numerate it would be a pretty fine statement too.

But we're not.

In fact you're pretty lucky if you can find people who excel at just one discipline let alone be good across multiple skill sets.

But you know what - even if you could hire those people I don't think I'd want to. I think the team would be strong and capable of producing greater results when you have specialists.

In your Incase example would having a specialist designer on the team possibly improve the quality of the email that you send? Or how about having someone who's passionate about writing do the copy? The increases in overall conversion might be small but if you weren't emailing 50,000 people but 1,000,000 people then the win might be worth it.

But then again if you were emailing 1,000,000 people you probably wouldn't just move on to a new project (rinse and repeat) - you'd MV test the hell out of it.

For getting a project off the ground I think the skillset you're talking about is great - it allows an individual to drive growth at a very high pace. However if you're an established operation competing against other established operations you're probably going to want a team of specialists who live and breathe their one area of expertise because the chances are they will be better at it than any generalist/specialist.

I love specialists; we have some extraordinary designers, developers and recently hired a brilliant copywriter. These individuals have been lifting the teams efforts dramatically. But, we've also got team members that work to determine what we should be designing, developing and writing; and those are the people where being a generalist is always going to be less productive or successful than a generalist/specialist who works especially well with their designer and and development colleagues. And that's really because they know a great deal of how those colleagues do their work. It's really the marketing generalists that I think need to adapt.

Though, for very small companies (with small budgets), I still strongly believe you've got to be multi-disciplinary; there's a strong chance you'll never be as good as a dedicated designer or developer, but at least you'll be able to provide a tremendous amount of value to your employer as one person. And with luck, you'll have enough success to hire some specialists-- but until then you'll be able to execute almost any campaign your budget will allow.

You seem to be getting 2 types of comments, understandably. I'm going to actually give you both at once. :)

First, the post is obviously a bit provocative toward "everyone" being a technical marketer. That's not likely and in a lot of agencies/in-house, not really necessary or even wanted. Not everyone's T shaped skill set will include Excel, MySQL, ecomm tech, and UX.

However, the post is obviously very helpful and informative for those who do want to expand in this direction. You titled it in a way that makes it something it's really not - a debate over whether we all should be technical. As you said " I'd rather we explore what it means to be technical and help each other develop those skills."

Great content on the post - I understand both reactions you're getting and I'm sure it was meant that way. Whatever gets eyeballs on this great content! Thanks for all the links - straight into Evernote they go. :)

I could not agree with this sentiment more. It may be because I started out in tech and have moved more and more into marketing, but I also believe some of the metrics and variables using in new search algorithms will require someone with a bit of technical sense to optimize, such as page load speed. Knowing how the servers/networks pass information, distance between database and server, network bottlenecks and settings such as GZip compression may not be the first thing that marketers look for when trying to speed up a site. In my current organization (non-profit) that is large enough to self-host their websites, but still have a one-man (me!) web operation being a proverbial "jack-of-all-trades" has its benefits. In the interest of not spamming the comments on my first post I will spare you the link, but I actually wrote about this same idea in one of my first attempts at blogging recently.Anthony

Jack of all trades master of many... or something like that... I am part of a very very small team where the above is just a small part of my job description. I can also add customer service rep, accountant, HR manager and as the windows BSOD loves to call me "system administrator". Making websites just doesn't cut it any more. You have to be flexible and adjust to the changing needs of your client. In order to stay ahead of the curve you need to be ready to learn what you may not know to get the job done; in the case that you business is not big enough to afford a specialist.Bravo on a great description of a small but evolving web design company :-)